


Something Borrowed

by periphrasis



Category: Real⇔Fake
Genre: Closeted Character, Corsetry, Fame, Filming, First Time, Idols, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-11-24 01:43:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20899577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/periphrasis/pseuds/periphrasis
Summary: Moriya believes that his hypothetical perfect girl is practical, low-maintenance, tolerant of his inattention, and not in a hurry to commit.  He is spectacularly wrong, on so many levels.





	Something Borrowed

“We have all been trying very hard to do our best. What’s important to me is that our fans enjoy the video as much as we’ve enjoyed making it.” Akane is smiling brilliantly, leaning against the back of the chair, which is still draped with organza.

Moriya turns the camera off, lets it drop to his side. His arm is starting to ache. He shouldn’t be doing so much of this himself, really. Filming should have been done by six, but it’s past nine, and only a few people are still hanging around. “I don’t know how people don’t get creeped out by hearing that. Still seems unnatural, to me.”

“I don’t know. I think it’s nice. I’m not sure if they really believe it, or if they just like that we make the effort to say it, but it’s nice.”

“Some of you make more effort more than others.”

“I have to make even more effort to compensate, then, don’t I?”

“Are you talking about me?” Kakeru emerges back in his street clothes. One could charitably say that he had made an attempt, in his behind-the-scenes segment, to smile. Once. Briefly. For about three seconds.

“Only that your fans don’t seem to expect you to be as demonstrative,” prompts Moriya.

“Is that thing on?” Kakeru eyes the camera with furrowed brow.

“No.” It’s Akane who answers. “Just chat between friends. We’re wrapping up.”

“I can do it because it’s how I am. He can’t,” and Kakeru nods in Akane’s direction, “because of how he is.” Then: “Are you about finished? I’ll split a cab with you as far as your place.”

How he is. Moriya’s eyes drift to the lace panel at Akane’s midriff, just for a moment, before he catches himself.

“We’re almost done, but you go on. Moriya’s going to give me a lift home, I think.”

“Are you sure?” asks Kakeru, at almost exactly the same moment that Moriya asks, “Am I?”

“Yes.” One answer for both.

Everything that’s happened, the weeks in between, and Kakeru has not yet relaxed in Moriya’s presence the way everybody else has. If he were less protective, would Akane still be here?

Moriya remembers being a teenager, sitting in the living room of Akane’s apartment after school, his brother hovering around with wary eyes the whole time the two of them were hanging out.

“I don’t like leaving you alone,” Kakeru is saying.

“I’m not going to be alone. Anyway, you should get back, or you won’t get to tuck Yusuke in.” Akane is grinning. Relaxed. At least one of them is.

Moriya follows Kakeru’s glance as it flicks around, but they really are the last. The crew cleaning the place up is coming back in the morning, evidently. But Kakeru looks genuinely alarmed, until he’s verified that fact. His shoulders relax, then, noticeably. “Cheap shot.”

“Are you sure you actually want to ride in the truck? You’d probably be happier with the cab.” Moriya starts to pack the camera back into its bag, along with the selection of cables and other bits and pieces that seem to have wound up everywhere in the general vicinity.

“Are you sure?” Kakeru does not seem to be asking the same question that Moriya is asking.

“I’m very sure. He’s not dangerous; he’s just slow. Go home.” Akane comes over just as Moriya is picking up the bag, and takes hold of Moriya’s arm.

Moriya is very sure he has missed something.

Kakeru turns to go, but stops at the door. “I’ll still be up awhile if you need me,” he says, before he makes his exit. “Text me whenever.”

They are alone.

“I’m not slow. I have everything together, now, if you’re ready to go.”

“You really are. You really, really are.” Akane is doing something with Moriya’s arm, which turns out to involve peeling his fingers away from the strap of the camera bag, and then lacing those fingers with his own fingers. “But you kept your promise, and now we’re going to celebrate, aren’t we?”

His hand is very warm.

“You don’t want to change before we leave?”

“Not if I don’t have to take a cab. I like this. It’s pretty. You don’t think it’s pretty?”

“It’s--”

Before he can get out the answer, Akane has already turned to: “Do you think I’m pretty?”

He is pretty. Of course he is. When his face is so worried, he’s probably even more beautiful. He must know it. Everybody alive knows it. His face is everywhere, has been everywhere for years, followed Moriya everywhere he went for so much of the time they were apart. But what is he supposed to say? “I thought you were pretty without the extensions in your hair, without all the makeup. I don’t know why...” Words. “Why you feel like you need to keep up all the performance.”

“I’ve been doing at least my eyes since I was fourteen.”

Why is the air suddenly so heavy in this room? “I know. But before that.” As long as he can remember, he thinks, and doesn’t say.

_You’re a creep. That’s what you’re being right now. An actual creep._

“I don’t think it’s a performance. This is how I am. This is what I like.”

“But you’ve always seemed like you’re... pretending, even with me. I wasn’t even sure if you liked me.”

“I didn’t think you would like me when I’m sad.” Moriya’s heart hurts, actually hurts. Akane is just breezing on, like it’s nothing, like always. “I’m not pretending to like you. I’m not pretending to--look at me, for heaven’s sake. I like to look like this for a reason. Sometimes you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but sometimes the cover is deliberately trying to market the book to its intended audience.” Something plaintive in it, even when he adds, “Especially if the audience isn’t that bright.”

Akane’s other hand is on Moriya’s arm, too, a little bit of fingernail digging into the fabric.

“We should really,” Moriya says carefully, “be having this conversation at your place, where we’re not going to get interrupted by the cleaners or something.” He can see it, the slight fall in Akane’s expression. Maybe too careful. “Over a drink?”

That helps. Instantly, it helps. Lights Akane up from inside. “I have a bottle of champagne waiting.”

* * *

Theoretically, the truck is also private, but then they would be having that conversation in the cab of a truck.

It was an investment, the truck. He’d owned another car before this, but he was trying to take his career seriously, and he’d been trying to fit way too much equipment into the back of a little Toyota hatchback for too long.

At the time he bought it, he’d had a girlfriend. He’d had her for nearly a year, which was practically a record. They’d been talking about moving in together. She’d dumped him, over the truck.

Akane seems perfectly happy, incongruous as he looks in the passenger’s seat, playing with the radio until he finds his own voice. Not one of the recent Stellar Crowns songs. A solo release from a few years ago. Moriya pulls out of the parking lot, keeping his eyes on the road, as Akane sings along with himself on the radio, sometimes picking out a harmony line where none had existed on the original track.

It’s a song about being in love. Most of them are. Moriya has heard them all a thousand times.

By the time they make it back to Akane’s apartment, he’s found two more of his own songs, plus a handful of others by other people that he clearly knows just as well. They have managed to avoid having any kind of serious conversation. Moriya has managed to spend the whole trip thinking about driving and not thinking about where he’s going.

When they arrive, he crosses to open the passenger side door without even thinking about it, and offers a hand to help Akane step down.

Akane does not let go of his hand, after that. Uses it, instead, to pull him into the building. He unlocks the door, pushes it open, but lingers there; Moriya assumes he’s intended to enter ahead of him, but the hand pulls him back.

“Pick me up.”

“What?”

“I want you to carry me in.”

“I can’t carry you in. If I try to pick you up I’m just going to drop you, and six different people are going murder me if you so much as stub your toe.”

Akane is still looking at him expectantly. He’s smiling. He’s been smiling pretty much the whole trip. “I hope that you’re intending to say something here about how out of shape you are, and not about my impeccably-maintained waistline.”

Moriya looks at his waist. It’s automatic. He wonders, momentarily, whose idea it was to put Akane into a corset. He wonders if it’s uncomfortable. He looks at all that lace. All that white lace.

A line is being crossed, here.

Might as well make a fuss about it. Maybe Moriya himself isn’t the sort to make a fuss, not about any of this, but here they are, and sometimes you don’t make a fuss about this sort of thing for your own sake.

A princess carry is absolutely not going to happen. Lifting him up from the waist, arms tight around him, that Moriya can do. Akane is laughing, bright and clear, and holding onto his shoulders as best he can. A couple steps. It’s only a couple steps into the apartment, to set Akane down on the other side of the threshold.

He has a hard time catching his breath.

“You need a trainer.” Akane puts his hands up around Moriya’s neck as soon as the door is closed. “I knew you were in love with me. When they called me. As soon as I knew you came to find me. I didn’t know you were going to make me wait so long.”

“Do you love me?” Moriya can barely whisper the question.

“Mm-hmm.” Now, of all times, for Akane to get shy, pressing his face against Moriya’s, cheek to cheek, so they’re not looking each other in the eye anymore.

“Will you still, when we’re both penniless because of how stupid an idea this is?”

A giggle. Good. “Yeah.”

This. This feeling. This is not how it felt with the girl who got pissed off about the truck. It’s not how it felt with the girl who was mad that he didn’t want to shoot her terrible spec script. Or the girl who got upset that he didn’t go to her cousin’s wedding because he was working. Or the girl who, in high school, had, after six and a half weeks of dating, suggested that he was spending too much time “with him”. She didn’t need to specify who. Why would she need to specify who?

Only here, the sweet flutter in his stomach and the light feeling in his chest.

“I have been an idiot,” he concedes.

“Do you want the drink, or do you want to tear my clothes off?”

“I can’t tear your clothes off while you’re in that.”

“They can’t give me an outfit like this and expect me not to badly misuse it.” Akane pulls away from him with a dramatic sigh.

Moriya catches his arm, waits just long enough to watch his face brighten again, and then leans in to kiss him. It is received enthusiastically. Some moments later, he murmurs, “I thought you were more shy than this.”

“I’m terrified. I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to be pretty and zero time figuring out how to get somebody into bed. I assumed the pretty would just... take care of it. Now my heart’s beating about a hundred kilometers a minute and if I stop to think about it I’m going to have to remember I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“You’re a virgin.”

“No, I mean, well, _yes_, but there’ve been a few times that I almost--it’s not like nobody’s found me attractive.” Akane hits him on the shoulder, though in the least aggressive way possible. A token protest.

“I don’t imagine you get a lot of opportunities.”

“People manage surprisingly well. Though all of Stellar Crowns pairing off, that’s unusual.” Akane pulls away from him, but only far enough to turn around, present his back to Moriya. He reaches up to sweep his hair up and out of the way. “Unzip me?”

Moriya does, slowly. Lace, underneath. He could think more about that, but--lace. He puts his hand on Akane’s back, while Akane pulls the top off from the front. “Have you been waiting, all this time?”

“No,” he says, but brightly. “At the beginning... they gave me a roommate who would have liked to, but he said I was too sad. There was a man, a producer, who... it went badly. And then I was so busy. And then sometimes there’s a boy you’d like to like, but kissing him is like kissing your brother, and...”

Moriya puts his arms around Akane’s torso, puts hands on his chest. The lace is really barely there. More negligee than tank top, especially vanishing underneath the corset. If he had worried, a little, that the difference from a woman’s body would be off-putting--it isn’t. The excitement is all in touching the places that were previously untouchable. “But you want me to?”

Akane’s head bobs, mutely now, but he puts his hands over Moriya’s.

Moriya can feel the heartbeat. Quick.

“Come to bed,” says Akane, twisting out of his arms and heading in the direction of a room Moriya hasn’t seen since they were teenagers.

He hadn’t been sleeping here, when everything happened. He’d refused to sleep in his own room, even, during the whole affair. Moriya had guessed, at the time, that if he’d opened the door, he would have seen everything in that room almost exactly as it was when they were teenagers. And in Souma’s room, the same.

Souma’s door is still closed. Akane’s is not.

No more desk piled with more CDs than books. There used to be a television. A Playstation. A twin bed.

The bedroom is an impassioned rejection of minimalism, now. The new bed takes up the majority of the space, and has so many pillows strewn on it that it barely seems to have enough space for a person to sleep. The lighting is all indirect. The big window’s been covered by a blackout curtain.

The duvet is rumpled. One of the bureau drawers is slightly ajar, and strewn across it are a variety of beauty products, only a few of which Moriya can recognize. This is not a room that has been made ready for a potential visitor.

“It was closer,” says Akane, shoving a drawer closed on the nightstand. “For recording and everything. He’d want me to use it, I thought. And if I’m going to stay, I might as well be comfortable, and I don’t have to worry about keeping it all perfect for when they want to film candid at-home stuff.”

There is a plastic bottle still sitting out, on that nightstand, alongside a lamp and a tangle of charging cables.

Akane flings himself onto the bed, and Moriya is distracted by following him onto it, climbing over him, kissing his mouth, his jaw, his neck. Akane clings to his shirt, pulling him down; Moriya braces himself with hands on either side of Akane’s shoulders.

“I haven’t with a guy, before.”

The body beneath him squirms. Quietly: “You don’t have to touch it, if you don’t want. It’ll be almost the same.”

Moriya takes a second to compose those words into something comprehensible, and then can’t contain the laugh. “I’m not worried about your dick. I’ve handled one of those plenty, don’t see why another’s different.”

Maybe, until a moment ago, he had been nervous, but as the words come out they feel true, and when he puts his hand against the crotch of Akane’s pants... oh, it’s better than true. Both to feel it, and to hear the way Akane whimpers when he does it.

That same voice, playing on his car stereo, playing in the background at shopping centers, that voice in Youtube videos, on television, everywhere, for years.

“I just mean, I don’t want to assume I know what you want.”

“Maybe what I want is to get treated like I’m your girlfriend?” Akane puts his fingertips to his mouth. That manicure.

Moriya has not actually dated the sort of girls who get manicures like that. Or hair extensions. Who would lay there, perfumed and perfect, making coquettish faces up at him. He would have insisted, six months ago, even six weeks ago, that this wasn’t really his type.

It is.

He brings his hand back up to put it on Akane’s chest again, runs his fingers over the lace. Too much texture, it’s almost hard to find the nipple under the fabric. But he rubs his finger over that spot, hears the catch of breath, and grins. Sitting back, he pulls off his button-down, and then starts to unfasten Akane’s pants.

Takes both of them a little effort to get them off. And his underwear, why not? Why not all of it at once, just to save time, except that when Moriya has finally helped the second leg off of Akane’s foot, when he looks up, what he sees is Akane sprawled on the bed, naked except for corsetry and lace.

He exhales.

“You don’t like it?”

Moriya runs his hand up Akane’s calf, and then the inside of his thigh. Smooth. He pushes, just lightly, and despite the uncertainty in that question, the legs part without hesitation.

“Perfect.”

“You’re just saying that,” Akane protests, though softly.

Moriya puts his hands on Akane’s thighs, pushing his legs up just a bit further, and responds with lips and tongue. Eventually his fingers, too. Or, one finger, before he reaches up and makes a beckoning motion at Akane, who can actually reach the bedside table.

Akane hands him the bottle.

It doesn’t seem that different, feeling out what makes someone else feel good. It’s just that there’s so much less guesswork. Not because Akane is a guy, but because he is noisily appreciative in a way Moriya’s girlfriends have not been. Noisily appreciative in a way that makes Moriya wonder a little about the neighbors.

Not enough to take his fingers away. Just enough for the thought to cross his mind.

Other things that cross his mind include needing to push a lot of that lacy train out of the way before he makes a mess of it, which is easy, and the prospect of what is going to happen when there’s a lot more than lube to make a mess.

On the other hand, he is intensely aroused, the corset looks amazing, and he is slightly worried that taking it off is going to kill the mood.

“I need you.” The first words that Akane’s actually managed in several minutes of grinding back against Moriya’s hand. “I need you to fuck me. Please.” A couple breaths. “Please.”

He lets out a whine as Moriya extracts his fingers. “Anything,” says Moriya, going to pull his shirt off. “Anything for you.”

“Anything?”

Moriya pauses, holding onto the hem of his shirt. “Anything.”

“Get your camera.”

Moriya’s rational mind knows that this is another unnecessary risk. More importantly, it knows that the angles are all wrong when you try to shoot a sex tape from a tripod on a single camera, that the lighting is too low in here, that the things that make showy porn aren’t the same things that feel good.

Akane looks so obscenely hot, laying there, and clearly knows it.

He moves forward, his whole body across Akane’s, to kiss him on the mouth, hard, and then gets up. “Give me a minute.”

More than sixty seconds are required for the whole process. A fresh memory card, because there’s no way in hell he’s putting this on the same card as the real footage. Swapping to the backup battery, because it’s got a full charge.

He comes into the room with the camera already recording, because he wants that wider shot of Akane spread out on the bed, but what he gets is even better. “You’re not even waiting for me?”

Akane has twisted halfway to the side, back still against the pillows but one hip elevated. He’s doing with his own fingers what Moriya was doing just a few minutes ago. “You took so long, and I felt so empty.”

“Don’t stop.” Moriya sets the tripod down on the bed for a moment, moves close, because he has to. He has to capture this. Still, the longer it takes, the more unbearable it is. He leaves the camera sitting at what is a terrible angle--but better than nothing--to get the tripod up, and then carefully mounts it and makes sure it’s capturing a good swath of the bed.

A good swath of Akane, still partially in costume, panting and writhing.

Moriya rushes to get his shirt off, his jeans. To join Akane in bed. He’s careful not to get between the camera and its subject, though. This is not really about filming them both. It is about filming Akane.

“On your side, like that.” With Akane facing the camera, Moriya gets behind him. He carefully arranges the skirt, train, whatever it’s supposed to be so that the lace is arranged over Akane’s hip, but there’s not really a good way to keep it out of the way without one of them laying on it, which seems to be an even worse idea.

Think about draping it so that it looks artistic and appealing. Worry about everything else later.

“It feels... like a lot.”

Moriya is only pressed against him, now, too, the length of his erection against Akane’s body. “If it’s too much--”

“I can take it. I need it.”

“I’ll go slow. If anything hurts, tell me right away, okay?”

“I don’t want it slow, I--”

“Just to start.”

“Please. I need it.”

It will have to do. Moriya wishes he could watch Akane’s face, but in this moment it is more important that the camera can watch it, can record it. The light blinks at him, encouraging. If he’s careful with this footage, for the rest of his life, he will be able to see this whenever he wants. To watch Akane’s face in the moment that Moriya takes his virginity, in the eternity it takes to enter him a centimeter at a time.

It does start out that slow. Neither of them is that patient. They get maybe sixty seconds of exquisitely slow lovemaking, and then it starts to devolve into fucking like pent-up teenagers.

A little better than it would have been as teenagers. Moriya has enough sense to know when they really, really need to stop for a few seconds for more lube, now, in a way he almost certainly wouldn’t have at seventeen or eighteen. Then again, at that age, he might not have lasted long enough for it to be necessary.

He barely lasts longer, as it is.

He never gets the chance to ask if what he’s about to do is okay, because by then Akane is demanding it: “Come in me. You have to. I need it. Please.” Variations on this, over and over.

When has he ever told Akane no?

Afterwards, fighting off a wave of sleepiness, he realizes that Akane, too, has gone still and is breathing heavily. When Moriya pulls out, Akane twists, reaches back to pull him down for a kiss. Still a pornographic degree of tongue. Not all of this will turn out to have been unworthy of the camera.

“When did you?”

“A little before you did--god--I thought that would be obvious.”

“It might have been more obvious if you weren’t screaming the whole time.”

“It felt good.” Akane twists back away from him, but Moriya can see that he’s smiling. Smug.

It feels good, even now, to lay beside him and wrap arms around him, pull him close. If he were just a little bit taller, maybe they’d fit together better. But they do still fit together awfully well.

He strokes Akane’s chest and down his stomach, then just lets his fingers keep drifting, over the decorative front laces of the corset.

There are spots that are noticeably moist.

“I love you,” Moriya murmurs, “but there is no way we are going to keep this secret.”

* * *

They lay there for some time, but eventually Akane gets up, turns the camera off, and heads out to the bathroom. When he doesn’t come back reasonably quickly, Moriya wanders out after him and finds him in the kitchen, in a robe, doing something that is probably some kind of attempt at spot cleaning.

“Is it okay to get that wet?”

“It’s not real silk, they’re not that spendy on these things. I might just have to tell them I... spilled on it.”

“What’s done is done. Is there really champagne?” Moriya asks the question while already rummaging in Akane’s fridge. It does contain champagne. Not nearly enough in the way of real food, but there is champagne. Moriya takes the bottle out and goes looking in cupboards for white wine glasses, at least, if not flutes.

There aren’t wine glasses at all. Moriya winds up pouring it into tumblers, and then pressing one of them into Akane’s hands. Akane sips at it, smiles shyly at him over the rim.

“There are worse things to be than broke newlyweds. We’ll manage.”

“They’ll be mad at me, but I don’t think it will come to that. It’s not like... I mean, everyone I work for, everyone I work with, everyone who’s ever seen me on television, you think they don’t guess? They won’t fire me for having you unless I’m shockingly indiscreet.”

“The corset wouldn’t count as an indiscretion?”

“Making out with you in public would be a problem. But if we just make an effort... we’ll get you a good suit. I’ll take you to events as my plus-one. Explain to everybody about how, since I lost my family, you, my childhood friend, are practically as close as a brother.” Akane sets his glass down and reaches for Moriya, kisses him.

“I’m not feeling a particularly brotherly love, here.”

“Nobody will really think you do, but you’ll keep up the fiction like a good boy. We’ve established you can act at least that well. We’ll keep paying for your apartment and picking up your mail, and keep the house up nice for company, and this place will be ours. We pretend to be very good friends, everybody else pretends not to know, maybe a few people on the internet enjoy speculating while we get old together.”

Moriya, who once dated a girl for a year and dithered about whether he was really ready to cohabitate, nods along with this proposition from the boy he’s been arguably involved with for less than three hours. He glances around the kitchen. The apartment. It’s familiar. It’s so easy to think of it as home. “Do you think Souma would be okay with it?”

“I think he liked you. I think he knew I liked you. I should have just told him.”

“Bring the champagne and let’s go back to bed.”

* * *

Three blissful days before Moriya is cornered in the office he’s commandeered for editing, by the middle-aged wardrobe supervisor whose name he keeps forgetting. He knows she is the wardrobe supervisor, because she is carrying a very familiar piece of clothing.

It’s early. Too early; he’s still on his first coffee. He’s left Akane home in bed.

She closes the door.

“I wanted to talk to you,” she says, “about this.”

“Yes?” As blandly as possible.

“I realize that you have a long history with him, but you need to understand that some of the boys, you know, in this line of work...” She scowls down at the corset, but has gotten back to a milder expression by the time she looks up at him. “They can be impulsive.”

Moriya takes a deep breath and studies the space just over her shoulder. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“People will expect you to be more responsible and to maintain a higher degree of self-control, you understand.”

“Self-control.” He can almost smell his career in flames.

“I can’t tolerate any repeats of this sort of foolishness.”

“I... understand.”

“I would really prefer that you made sure the boys don’t engage in any horseplay while still in costume, but if,” she says pointedly, “if damage happens to occur, please refrain from attempting to remedy things yourself, or letting him do it. Just pin a note to the piece suggesting that it needs to be cleaned or mended.”

Moriya has been entrusted with this. Discretion. In the face of a man who might have been completely unhinged, he could keep his cool. In the face of a woman who kind of reminds him of his mother, he realizes that it’s just his ears that are burning. “Yes, of course.”

“It’s not like with off-the-rack clothing where we can just replace something that’s damaged easily, and virtually all of it requires dry cleaning.”

“Of course.”

“Anyway, he seemed very upset about having to bring it back like this. He’s a good boy, at heart. A lot of us have worked with him before, you know.” She pauses. “We’re all very concerned that he should be well taken care of.”

“I’m...” Moriya struggles for words. He settles on: “I’m going to do the best I can.”

**Author's Note:**

> This whole fic is really secretly just the personification of my pretentious bullshit fucking the personification of my dislike of pretentious bullshit. But also, I really love both of these boys, so even if this is now hands down the most obscure thing I've written for, I couldn't not.


End file.
